There’s a lot of tough jobs in hockey, but very few are tougher than shutting down the opposition’s star players. When that star player happens to be Sidney Crosby, the league’s best (or second best) player, you have your work cut out for you.

Very few players are able to handle his combination of speed, poise, strength, vision, smarts, and any other trait you can could think of to describe a hockey player — Crosby literally has them all. The best bet is trying to get under his skin, and that’s exactly what Brandon Dubinsky did the last time these two teams met in the playoffs in 2013-14.

Back then, very few were giving the Blue Jackets much of a chance, not against the Penguins. The Jackets were a balanced, blue-collar group with very few faces anyone outside Ohio would recognize. One of those no-name guys would have to take on the best player in the world, and that someone was Dubinsky. It looked like a huge mismatch on paper, but somehow it wasn’t.

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